Related papers: Testing a hypothesis for the evolution of sex
Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…
The nature of epistasis has important consequences for the evolutionary significance of sex and recombination. Recent efforts to find negative epistasis as source of negative linkage disequilibrium and associated long-term sex advantage…
We study the evolution of sexual and asexual populations in general fitness landscapes. We find deep relations between the mathematics of biological evolution and the formalism of quantum mechanics. We give the general structure of the…
The evolutionary process has been modelled in many ways using both stochastic and deterministic models. We develop an algebraic model of evolution in a population of asexually reproducing organisms in which we represent a stochastic walk in…
The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…
We study the evolution of the probability density of an asexual, one locus population under natural selection and random evolution. This evolution is governed by a Fokker-Planck equation with degenerate coefficients on the boundaries,…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
We use a simple model for biological ageing to study the mortality of the population, obtaining a good agreement with the Gompertz law. We also simulate the same model on a square lattice, considering different strategies of parental care.…
The benefit of sexual recombination is one of the most fundamental questions both in population genetics and evolutionary computation. It is widely believed that recombination helps solving difficult optimization problems. We present the…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
Stochastic phenotype switching has been suggested to play a beneficial role in microbial populations by leading to the division of labour among cells, or ensuring that at least some of the population survives an unexpected change in…
We introduce a model for the evolution of sexually transmitted diseases, in which the social behavior is incorporated as a determinant factor for the further propagation of the infection. The system may be regarded as a society of agents…
In this paper we consider a generalization to the asexual version of the Penna model for biological aging, where we take a continuous time limit. The genotype associated to each individual is an interval of real numbers over which Dirac…
The idea of this review is to connect the different models of evolution to those of biological ageing through Darwin's theory. We start with the Eigen model of quasispecies for microevolution, then introduce the Bak-Sneppen model for…
A fundamental issue discussed in evolutionary biology is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Here we develop non-robust models provided in [1] and attempt to get robust models investigated how differentiation of…
We have modified the sexual Penna model by introducing the fluctuating environment and fluctuations representing physiological functions of individuals. Additionally, we have introduced the mother care corresponding to the protection…
A large amount of population models use the concept of a carrying capacity. Simulated populations are bounded by invoking finite resources through a survival probability, commonly referred to as the Verhulst factor. The fact, however, that…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
We study time continuous branching processes with exponentially distributed lifetimes, with two types of cells that proliferate according to binary fission. A range of possible system dynamics are considered, each of which is characterized…
Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human…